What do Ads add to your brain?

Vithal C Nadkarni, TNNMar 10, 2006, 12.05am IST

What effect do ads have on your brain? They surely influence you, neuroscientists say in a recent study, but not in ways that most ad-makers want. The great majority of the ads not only failed to rouse the key reward and mirror-neuron areas of the brain, but they often stimulated bad ones, say UCLA scientists, Marco Lacoboni and Joshua Freedman, who performed brain scans on people as they watched Super Bowl ads in America on February 5.

Their research belongs to the brave new world of neuromarketing, which seeks to measure the brain's response to ads, brands and a variety of other messages littering the semiotic landscape.

In the study, the scans were performed with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging on five subjects. These showed up brain areas that became more active during the ads, thus providing clues to the emotions and feelings likely to have been triggered.